The Night Watchman (52 page)

On checking my cell phone registry, I discovered that G had made three calls to Rio de Janeiro over the past three days, and two to Paris. On calling the Brazilian number, I discovered it was the Prosecutor’s Office. The same was true for the French number.

Gabriel obviously hadn’t felt as morally obligated to Susana and Morel as I did.

The return address he had used on the express mail receipts were inventions. The name he’d written – Santorini – was Ana’s maiden name.

To check my reasoning about what he’d sent off to Brazil and France, I called Joaquim.

‘Hey, Henrique, I’m really glad you called,’ he said in a relieved voice.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘You didn’t seem yourself when you came over.’

‘I’ve been a bit disoriented of late,’ I told him. ‘But listen, I called because I think I forgot to ask you what I owe you for the copies of the DVD you made for me.’

‘You must be joking, Henrique. If you get any of those bastards, I’ll pay
you!’

Bagnatori called yesterday evening at just after seven o’clock, Lisbon time. He asked for Gabriel Santorini and told me that he’d just watched the DVD I’d sent him.
‘Uma gente inacreditavelmente ruim,’
he said in his singsong Brazlian accent.
Unbelievably bad people.

‘Yes, I’d very much like to see them prosecuted.’

‘Who wouldn’t!’ Bagnatori went on to say that he’d been accumulating evidence on Forester for years.

‘So why haven’t you arrested him yet?’ I asked.

‘He’s well connected and smart. And the girls won’t testify against him. You have to understand a lot of them are so poor they’ve never been in a hotel before. He takes them to the shops in Ipanema to pick out dresses from New York and the Palace Hotel in Copacabana to drink French champagne. They’ve never seen a crystal chandelier before. Or waiters in dinner jackets. They’re from the favelas. And they discover that it’s nice to sleep in a bed with satin sheets. It makes no difference that a sixty-year-old slob pants on top of them for a few minutes. They figure that’s his right for buying them so many presents.’

‘Is there anything you can do about the other men in the movie?’

‘When we spoke, you told me one lived in Portugal and the other in France.’

‘Sottomayor – the guy with the cane – lives here in Lisbon. The fat guy – Gilles Laplage – lives in Paris.’

‘Unless they come to Rio, there’s nothing I can do. I told you that already.’

‘If they are friends with Forester, maybe you could somehow lure one or both of them to Brazil. Maybe you could arrest foreigners more easily than Brazilians.’

He laughed in a burst. ‘You ever been to Rio de Janeiro, Monroe?’

‘No.’

‘Sex tourism is the main industry here. Tens of thousands of American and European men fly to Rio every month, eager to drink caipirinhas and fuck Brazilian pussy until their dicks fall off.’

I replied with silence.

‘Look, I know you’re disappointed,’ he said, ‘but that’s the way it is. You wouldn’t want me lying to you. It’s economics. If we started arresting men like Sottomayor for getting some young tail while on vacation, then our fancy hotels would all go broke and my boss would have my ass!’

Denis Gershon hasn’t phoned yet. I don’t expect him to. I no longer have any hope of convincing anyone in a position of authority to take over this fight for me.

When we fail at something, we are reminded what is possible and what is not, and I think that maybe I’ve known all along that this wasn’t going to end in any sort of satisfying way. I thought that I couldn’t hear the messages the world was trying to tell me of late, but it’s possible that I’d already heard them and simply couldn’t accept what they had to say.

And yet it’s also true that the idea of embarking on a slow and solitary campaign for justice – entirely in secret – appeals to me. After all, in a year or two, or maybe only in a few months, Sottomayor is sure to miss the sly pleasure of telling a thirteen-year-old girl to get on her knees for him. Given his personality, I think it’s very unlikely that he’s going to give up such extracurricular enjoyments just because one of his partners in crime met a violent end. Or because he had a bit of trouble with a Colorado-born cop who can’t even speak Portuguese correctly.

I’ll have to study his routines closely, of course. And learn all I can about him. The tricky part will be coming up with a plan for trapping him that won’t put me or anyone I love at risk. Of course, it’s possible that I’ll end up having to admit that it just can’t be done – that he’s simply too high up in the tower for me to reach. But my childhood has made me resourceful and patient. And quietly devious, as well. I think it would be silly to bet against anyone who has survived what I’ve survived. Gabriel and me both.

Private detective work? It’s probably what I’ve been preparing to do nearly all my life.

Today is Saturday 11 August 2012. I woke at dawn this morning and watched the pink and gold sunrise while sitting at my bedroom window. I considered floating up and away towards all that colour, but I preferred to stay with Ana and my kids.

When I stood up to go downstairs, my wife turned over and told me in a half-asleep voice that she almost forgot that she owed me fifty euros in cash since my police benefits hadn’t yet been cancelled. I told her I’d take her and the kids out to lunch at Nood with my windfall, and she puckered out her lips so that I’d give her a kiss, and after I did, she rolled on her belly and went back to sleep.

I’d decided the night before to return Sandi’s ring to her mother, but after eating my oatmeal and blueberries I discovered that it wasn’t in the spice cabinet where I’d left it, which meant that Gabriel wasn’t ready yet to part with it. Hunting for it gave me other ideas, and while my second cup of tea was steeping, I took out the box of my mother’s treasures from its hiding place and ripped open the yellowing tape I’d sealed it with twenty-eight years earlier. Mom’s copy of Pablo Neruda’s
Twenty Love Poems
was at the bottom, under the charcoal drawings she’d done of me when I was little and the old amethyst brooch she wore every Sunday to church, and my half of the deck of her cards with Lisbon monuments on the back that I’d divided with Ernie. I didn’t know that her book was what I was after, but when I saw the cover – a white kite flying against a pale blue sky – my heartbeat began to race.

When I opened the book to the title page, a flower fell out – a golden columbine.

I put the papery, faded-yellow flower back where it had been and paged forward. The book smelled sour, like dust and vinegar. On opening the first page, I discovered it had been published in 1942 by Colleción Cometa. How did I remember after all these years that the quote I wanted was in the fourteenth poem?

I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.

You could tell a lot about Mom just by seeing how perfectly straight she’d underlined those beautiful words.

The tip of her pencil had been right here,
I thought, pressing hard below the first line, so that a fraction of her graphite would come off on my fingertip and become part of me.
She’d looked at this page, right where I’m looking now.

Over breakfast, I called Ernie because I’d finally figured out that our mother had understood what she most wanted for us after reading Pablo Neruda. While I was having trouble putting the closeness to Mom I felt into words, I realized that what she wanted so badly had, in fact, come to pass, which meant that I didn’t need to explain much of anything. ‘We’ve had really good adventures, haven’t we?’ I said instead.

‘Yeah, it’s been amazing!’ he replied in his little brother voice.

‘And we’re not finished yet.’

‘No, lots of good things are sure to happen over the coming years.’

His enthusiasm prompted me to tell him about my therapy. When I was finished, he told me that I’d done really well. He also said he’d help pay for my sessions.

‘My benefits cover them,’ I told him.

‘Then I’ll start paying you and Ana back for what you’ve given me over the years.’

‘Ernie, did you rob a bank or something?’

‘No, I sold two paintings.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Two of my flower paintings . . . I sold them. About two weeks ago.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘You’d just gotten home from the hospital and it didn’t seem the right time, and then we got to talking about other things – and anyway, I’m telling you now.’

Across the sixty miles between us, I could see the smile of a man racing so far ahead of our expectations for him that he could no longer even spot them behind him any more. ‘Who bought them?’ I asked.

‘The owner of a restaurant in England – it’s called the Jardine Bistro. It’s in a town called Wivenhoe. His name is Chris. He’s originally Swiss but he’s lived in England a long time.’

‘How did he find out about your work?’

‘One of his friends found it on my Facebook page. She’s interested in flowers. Her name is Jo. She told him about me. I’m in touch with them both.’

‘You have a Facebook page?’

‘Yeah, I made one a few months ago.’

‘And this Swiss guy bought two of your paintings?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Without seeing them in person?’

‘I have high-definition images of them on my Facebook page. I also took close-ups of the most important details and mailed them to him.’

‘Ernie, how much did he pay you?’ I asked in a suspicious voice; I was expecting that the restaurateur had taken advantage of him.

‘A thousand euros.’

‘For the two?’

‘No, each.’

That was far more than I’d expected, but something didn’t add up. ‘You asked for a thousand euros each?’ I questioned.

‘It’s way too high a price, I know, but—’

‘It’s not too high!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m just amazed you asked for a decent price.’

‘I asked so much so he wouldn’t buy them.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘The ones he wanted I really liked, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell them, so I asked for a ridiculous price and he agreed. My plan backfired!’ He laughed merrily. It sounded as if he’d climbed up to a sunlit hillside inside himself.

Ernie told me he’d sold a large landscape of Black Canyon and a portrait of Rosie sleeping on her rug.

‘Have you got the money yet?’ I was still looking for the burnt underside of this miracle.

‘Yeah, Chris did a bank transfer the other day. And he’s planning a show of my work at his restaurant. He has art on the walls. He changes the shows every three or four months. Mine will go up in late November. He says people still spend money at Christmas in England – the economic crisis isn’t as deep there as it is here.’

I didn’t want to cry in front of him, but I also didn’t want to hang up. So I chose the middle route and said nothing.

‘You there?’

‘More or less,’ I whispered.

‘Yeah, it kind of stunned me, too,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I figure I can pay you half of what I’ve received so far and still have enough money to keep me and the garden going for a while.’

I still can’t get over Ernie’s success. I want to meet Chris and Jo – to meet two people who understand how talented my brother is. He agreed that we would go to Wivenhoe for the opening. He said he’ll drink a lot of valerian tea before the flight to steady his nerves. I’ll keep some Valium ready in case that doesn’t work.

I’ve looked up the Jardine Bistro on the Internet. It looks like a big brick house. According to Wikipedia, Wivenhoe has about ten thousand people and is on the banks of the River Colne. At the website for British National Rail, I discovered that you can get there from London’s Liverpool Street Station. The journey only takes an hour and five minutes. The flights from Lisbon to London take just two hours.

I figure we’ll stay in London for a couple of nights, then catch the train to Wivenhoe. And from there, riding high on Ernie’s success, we’ll head up to Scotland, since he and I have always wanted to see Loch Ness. Maybe Ana can find some transsexuals to interview in Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Strange that it never occurred to me that I could reach an English-speaking country so easily. Thinking about being there makes me giddy – as if I’ll be going beyond everything I could ever have hoped for me and Ernie, the moment we pass through passport control. Maybe seeing his paintings hanging up in an exhibition will mean that I can stop comparing him and me to the men we might have been. I really hope so, but I think I’ll only find out when it happens.

Over the last three nights, after Ana is asleep, I’ve sat at her desk in the living room and written to Lena about Gabriel, starting with when I was eight and he scribbled a first message on my hand, though what I told her was a lot more than just how and why he comes to me. Trying to convey feelings I don’t entirely understand made me stutter a lot inside my head and do a lot of rewriting. And made me see that it would be impossible to tell her about G without also explaining a lot about my parents and Ernie. And about why I had to finally stop lying.

Just this morning, I discovered that I like making the kids’ beds and cleaning up their rooms. To see their blankets smoothed down neatly and ready for them to climb into . . . What more could I want to accomplish? Ana understood. While watching me cleaning Nati’s windows, she told me things she’d never told me before: about bicycling to the port of Buenos Aires when she was a girl so she could watch the big ships being offloaded; and the red velvet curtains in the fancy hotel where her uncle Javier got a summer job playing piano, just a few months before he disappeared; and how her father used to show her the constellations in the night sky. I think she told me all these things because she knew I’d listen closely to what she was saying and go right on cleaning.

And this is what I realized: the sound of her voice – ambling through memories of her childhood – was the same sound as my own longing for a love that would never end.

Ernie told me he’s coming over tomorrow. He’s going to bring our baseball mitts, too. We’re going to have our first catch in thirty years, in Santa Marinha Square, and he isn’t going to take it easy on me; he’s going to throw real hard and make me run all over the place, because he said I need to strengthen my bad shoulder and leg. He told me that if he was satisfied with my effort, and didn’t start what he called my ‘usual whining!’, he was going to take me to the Gulbenkian cafeteria after lunch for a double helping of avocado mousse.